


We Dance on Our Graves with Our Bodies Below

by mytimehaspassed



Series: Dance On Our Graves Verse [3]
Category: The Pacific - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-12
Updated: 2011-06-12
Packaged: 2017-10-22 06:07:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/234700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mytimehaspassed/pseuds/mytimehaspassed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Snafu drives to Mobile with a full tank of gas and half a pack of cigarettes and the rest of a bottle of Jack Daniels in his lap.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Dance on Our Graves with Our Bodies Below

**WE DANCE ON OUR GRAVES WITH OUR BODIES BELOW**  
THE PACIFIC  
Sledge/Snafu; Snafu/OCs  
 **WARNINGS** : Modern era AU; spoilers for the series; mentions of war  
 **NOTES** : THIS IS WRITTEN BACKWARDS. So the end is the beginning, and the beginning is the end.

 **I. Spring**

Snafu drives to Mobile with a full tank of gas and half a pack of cigarettes and the rest of a bottle of Jack Daniels in his lap. He takes a swig for every car he passes, takes a swig for every two-story white plantation house swallowed by tall weeds, takes a swig for every song about heartbreak that comes on the radio. He smokes seven cigarettes before the sign for Mobile summons him off the highway, and smokes the other three at the top of Sledge’s long driveway, the car idling loudly and the radio off.

He sends Sledge a blank text message and he watches the living room curtains flutter open and he can’t see anything but the shape of a boy inside, the shape of a boy who stands there for a minute pressed to the glass and then moves back, and there’s a breathless moment where Snafu thinks Sledge won’t come outside, won’t see him at all, but then the front door is opening and Sledge is standing in the doorway and it starts to rain and Snafu flicks on the windshield wipers and they make rhythmic sounds back and forth and Sledge runs to the car and slides in the passenger seat. The rain taps against the roof of the car and they don’t look at each other and they don’t say anything, breathing quietly for one two three seconds, and Snafu wants desperately to light another cigarette, but the empty carton sits crumpled on the dash.

“Hey,” Sledge says, and he’s trying not to smile, Snafu can tell, trying so hard not to break the straight, pink lines of his lips where he’s told himself not to be happy, not to show Snafu how much he loves this, how much he wants this. He turns to look at the side of Snafu’s face, and he watches Snafu flex his fingers on the steering wheel, long and then short, his knuckles white and unbroken, and then he watches Snafu turn to him.

“Hey,” Snafu says, but Sledge swallows his voice with his tongue.

***

They park alongside one of the long, winding roads of a nearby farm, and Snafu pulls the car into the swell of cornstalks, and Sledge grips him so tight he barely has time to turn off the engine before he’s pulled into the backseat where Sledge starts to lick and bite and Snafu turns into him and he’s pulling off clothes and they’re moving together and Snafu can’t seem to make his mouth work the way that he wants to, but Sledge doesn’t seem to mind, and they get stuck in places and Sledge laughs breathlessly against Snafu’s skin, and the rain falls and falls and the humidity sticks to them like a blanket.

Afterwards, Sledge hands Snafu a cigarette from the pocket of his jeans, and Snafu lights it with the lighter from the dash, and he smokes in silence as Sledge hums low in his throat, his face pressed flush against Snafu’s chest.

***

Sledge navigates the way back to the house and pulls Snafu out of the car by his wrist, his fingers warm against Snafu’s pulse point. Sledge’s mother smiles tightly when she sees Snafu, and that may be because Snafu smells like dirt and cigarettes and the way the rain clings to the hot ground after a storm, and because Snafu stands whisper close to Sledge, and because Sledge hasn’t smiled this wide in days. She finds a pitcher of sweet tea and a plate of cookies and lays them out on the old oak coffee table and doesn’t make small talk like Snafu feared she would, and when Sledge leads Snafu up to his room by the sleeve of his shirt, she closes her eyes for a moment and forgets to breathe.

Sledge’s room is boyish blue with peeling wallpaper and more books than Snafu’s ever seen, and Sledge pushes the door closed behind them and leans back on his bed, his elbows propped up beside him, his feet barely touching the floor. Snafu trails one finger over one of the books on Sledge’s shelf, the dusty spine flecked and creased with use, and his finger comes back gray with dirt.

Sledge says, “C’mere,” and he hooks a finger in the air front and back and front again and Snafu looks at him sharply, and watches Sledge’s mouth open wetly, and there’s something inside his chest that tightens like a fist around his heart, and he comes, and Sledge buries his fists and his fingers inside Snafu’s clothes, and they slide together like puzzle pieces, and Sledge licks his way up the column of Snafu’s throat.

Snafu says, “The door ain’t locked,” but it’s not like he really cares, and Sledge laughs soft against Snafu’s cheek, and neither of them get up to check it.

***

(If Sledge’s mother heard their quiet gasps and slow grunts of pleasure upstairs behind the bedroom door, she doesn’t say anything to them later, when they sit guarded and uncomfortable around the long dining room table eating dinner out of the good company China that Sledge’s mother reluctantly pulled out of the hallway hutch, filling the glasses with sweet red wine and shining the cutlery by hand. Sledge’s father coughs and mentions newspaper headlines to no one in particular and Sledge runs his bare foot up Snafu’s inner thigh from beneath the table to get a reaction, but Snafu only quirks his mouth and asks Sledge’s mother to pass the peas in his soft Cajun drawl, the pads of his fingertips tickling the arch of Sledge’s foot.

Sledge turns to his mother to ask for more potatoes, but she doesn’t hear him over the whistle of the wind through the front porch chimes and the way that she swallows back her wine in greedy mouthfuls, her tongue heavy and full with the taste of the two little white pills she took before dinner. Sledge asks again, and her voice is calm and far away when she answers, saying, “Of course, darling,” her soft lilting accent in the quiet of the room and her fingers slipping the basket of bread over to his side.

Sledge frowns at the basket in his hands, not looking at her, his lips a smear of white across his face, and he doesn’t say thank you, but she doesn’t even notice.)

***

Snafu still dreams of the dust and earth of his mouth, still dreams of the sand beneath him, the grit of his teeth in Afghanistan, the grit of his teeth in Iraq. Snafu dreams in color, and he dreams in memories, and he doesn’t know what wakes him up in the dusk of the early morning with his fingers curled into claws, with his knees drawn up to his chest, but he comes alive with a violent shudder, the blood of his heart beating loudly in his ears. He counts to one hundred until he can control his breathing, counts to two hundred until he can barely feel his heart.

He doesn’t call out for Sledge, from where he lies in his bed on the other side of the wall. He doesn’t make a sound.

***

Snafu calls his dad from the pristine white telephone in Sledge’s parlor, propped against the wall with his hand holding the receiver to his ear, wrapping the cord around and around his finger, slowly, slowly, as it rings. Sledge had asked him to call that morning, after he had slipped into the guest room with bare feet on the hardwood, slipped under the covers when Snafu held them open for him, slipped into the space between Snafu and the wall with more grace than he should ever have, fitting his mouth to Snafu’s like it belonged there. They could hear Sledge’s mother downstairs humming softly as she flipped pancakes on the stove, humming softly as she squeezed oranges over empty glasses, and Sledge had asked him why he had come in the first place, his fingers dancing their way down Snafu’s chest, and Snafu couldn’t think of anything but the truth, so he shrugged, complacent, and closed his eyes when Sledge’s fingers slipped beneath his boxers.

Snafu’s father answers the call on the seventh ring, his breathless voice and the slight slur of alcohol. He says, “Hello?”

And Snafu says, “Dad,” his fingers gripping the receiver tight to his mouth, but his father hangs up before he can say more.

***

(Snafu had stolen the car.

Later, he goes out to the yard with Sledge’s Junior League baseball bat and swings until his hands start to bleed. They clean up the glass before Sledge’s father gets home, picking up the broken pieces with hand towels as Sledge’s mother watches from the kitchen sink, her mouth a slack line. The car doesn’t start when Snafu tries it, so they each take turns pushing it up the road to one of the manmade lakes, catching sand in their shoes as they watch the water swallow it, hungry, and Sledge takes Snafu’s hand, and doesn’t say anything when he starts to cry.)

***

They cower from the sun underneath the old oak tree in Sledge’s front yard, and Snafu lays his head on Sledge’s chest and listens to Sledge’s heart skip beats, and they don’t talk about why they’re both here, and they don’t talk about why Snafu left New Orleans to drive hundreds of miles with a faded black eye and a split lip that he keeps reopening, biting down hard when Sledge puts his mouth on Snafu’s skin, biting down hard to keep his tongue in check. Snafu starts and stops with every lull in the conversation, starts and stops with reasons and explanations and words that fall short in their definitions to describe how he feels when Sledge touches him, and he says Sledge’s name sometimes, his Christian name, and Sledge will look at him and Snafu won’t be able to breathe, and it’s never his fault, it’s never their fault, and Snafu will blink back tears and smile his most sarcastic smile and call him Sledgehammer just to piss him off, and they will pretend that everything is okay and, for the most part, it is.

And Sledge reads to him from one of the books in his room, one of the old ones about birds or something like that, with a torn cover and pages that keep falling out onto the grass, his arms around Snafu to hold the book up against Snafu’s chest, and the sun writes lines across them through the leaves of the tree, and they hear dogs barking in the distance, and the pull of an airplane through the sky, and Sledge’s voice is soft and small, but Snafu feels it shake him like the tremble of the ground in mortar fire, and it feels familiar. Sledge shapes words that Snafu doesn’t understand, doesn’t care to know, and when he lifts his hand up to turn the page, his arm jostles Snafu’s head close enough to kiss, so he does, a press of lips to Snafu’s temple, and Snafu closes his eyes and smells the wind shaking the tree above them, smells the sickly sweet tang of brewed lemonade, smells the far off scent of a cookout fire being stoked into submission.

They can hear Sledge’s father’s car roll up the driveway, the jingling of his keys as he gets out, the slamming of the front door, and they can hear the soft murmur of Sledge’s mother greet him in the kitchen, her lilting laughter as he kisses her like he always does, his hand on the small of her back, tipping her towards the floor. Sledge kisses Snafu again, his dry mouth somewhere in Snafu’s hair, and Snafu makes a noise that he’s not entirely proud of, and Sledge laughs softly against him, and goes back to reading out loud, his voice closer to Snafu’s ear, deeper.

And it feels familiar.

And it feels like home.

 **II: Winter**

Sledge calls him in the late afternoon. Snafu sits out on his father’s porch with a cigarette in his mouth and his feet on the railing, crossed at the ankles, pressing the phone close to his ear. It’s been a month since he’s heard Sledge’s voice. It’s been three since he’s last seen him, and Snafu closes his eyes and knows that the sun that’s sloping past the horizon and doing nothing to ward off the slight chill of New Orleans is the same sun that Sledge is sitting under as he sprawls in his father’s car in rural Alabama and talks to Snafu in this hushed, apologetic voice. Snafu knows that Sledge knows that he should be there, that Snafu would trade his father’s tight fist for Sledge’s cool, dry touch any day.

Sledge says, “I’m sorry,” and he means more than just the words he said, more than just the things he thought, and Snafu breathes, and it’s like something that’s had a hold of him for years has now been lifted, something that’s gripped him tight and never been able to let go, something that he could never name.

Sledge says, “I’m sorry,” and Snafu breathes out smoke and says it back.

***

(His father drinks in the morning and drinks in the evening and drinks in between, and Snafu waits for the tap of his shoes on the floor in front of Snafu’s bedroom, waits for the curl of his hand on the knob, the grip of his father’s belt wrapping itself around and around his strong hands in anticipation of being struck. It’s always like this, and maybe Snafu broke something in Afghanistan, in Iraq, maybe he broke something inside himself that knew this was the way it had to be, that this was the way it always will be, for him, for his father.

Maybe Sledge broke something so deep inside him that Snafu doesn’t even know who he is anymore, doesn’t even know who he should be.

He watches his door swing open, the squeak of the rusty hinges, and he braces himself for the blow.)

***

Sledge sends Snafu drawings of the birds that he’s seen, and Snafu collects them all in a folder that he fits underneath his mattress, pulling them out at night to trace the colored feathers, the sharp beaks. Sledge writes their Latin names in neat, tiny script at the bottom of the pictures, in the same space as his signature, loose and sprawling and perfect, and Snafu knows each letter by heart, knows the spacing, knows the coils and twists of each word. It’s always like this, he knows, it will always be like this.

Snafu gets a job with one of the mechanics in town who was impressed by the stripes on his uniform, who was impressed by the slow, easy way that Snafu talks of the desert. He works with his hands on rusted out, dirty cars all day, lighting cigarette after cigarette, and pretends to flirt with the receptionist who gives him modest smiles when he catches her watching him, running two fingers down the length of her skirt in a clear invitation that Snafu never takes. He goes out at night sometimes, with some of the boys from the shop, who crowd around each other in dive bars and pay for bitter-tasting drinks, starting fights but never ending them, their slick, greased hands and missing teeth.

Snafu comes home and, most of the time, his father is passed out with a cold beer in his hand, the static of the broken TV flickering between channels, a fresh cigarette smoking from the ashtray on the coffee table. And Snafu will slip quietly through the house, toeing his shoes off at the door, his hands leaving black prints wherever he touches, and he will go to sleep with Sledge’s voice in his head, his soft smile and the white of his teeth, and nothing will feel out of place.

Most of the time. But he knows, just like his father knows, that this was never meant to last.

***

The day Sledge texts him a picture of a girl from his community college art class, smiling shyly and reaching out a hand as if to stop Sledge from taking the picture, Snafu goes out to get drunk and comes home with a boy. The boy winds himself around Snafu like he’s breathing through osmosis and kisses the space underneath Snafu’s jaw and all Snafu can think about is the way Sledge would curl his tongue on Snafu’s skin, the way Sledge would bury his hands in Snafu’s hair, pulling as tight as Snafu could stand it, and then tighter than that. The boy moans something that might be Snafu’s name, but it doesn’t sound like Sledge at all, so Snafu covers the boy’s mouth with his own, his lips pink and swollen and ready to forget.

The boy pushes Snafu back against his bed, and Snafu thanks Christ his father has decided to get drunk somewhere else for the night, because the boy starts moaning loud like Snafu’s doing something incredible, his fingers dancing around the boy’s fly, his lips open and wet and numb. Snafu moves clothes until he can only feel the warmth of skin, and they move together, but it’s not even close to being what Snafu remembers Sledge feeling like, so he reaches for another swallow of whiskey, and when he turns back everything is blurrier than before, so he figures that’s good enough.

Snafu says, “Gene,” and it’s breathy and low, cool against the heat of their bodies, and he swallows back the taste of somebody else, even if it feels like he’s betraying someone he loves.

The boy says, “My name is David.”

Snafu doesn’t even listen.

***

(The next time, it’s a girl, who giggles as he pulls her past his sleeping father, her skirt slipping off easily under his fingers, her shallow depths and the wet heat of his tongue on her breasts. She moans quietly enough, but his father smiles at him when he climbs out of his room in the morning, the crust of sleep shadowing his eyes, the scratch marks on his back red and mute with pain.

His father hands him a cup of coffee with the smudged ink of the newspaper still clinging to the handle, and Snafu wants to tell him that it’s only a phase, that girls are just as warm as boys are, but it’s the first time in years that his father’s hands on him are light and proud, and Snafu is nothing if not selfish.)

***

Sledge sends him a postcard from the Grand Canyon. The stock photography mocks him from the cover, and when he turns it around, Sledge has written the words Miss You in big, block letters that could mean little else. Snafu feels that something inside of him that’s broken, feels that something twist and turn and try to break free, and he feels the burning wet of his eyes before he even knows what he’s doing. He swipes at them angrily and steals his father’s keys from the hook by the door, and he drives until he’s almost out of gas, stopping somewhere near the border to Mississippi, pulling over when he can’t go any further.

He turns off the engine and slides into the backseat, letting the noise and rumble of the highway wash over him, and if he closes his eyes, it almost sounds like the roar of a Humvee underneath his feet, the salt and sting of sand in his mouth, the slow burn of the sun on his face. Cars in every part of the world sound the same, Sledge had told him once, when Snafu was young and bright and didn’t know anything of the way the earth revolved, didn’t know anything outside of the rowdy sprawl of New Orleans. Until he had climbed out into the desert of Afghanistan, he had never seen sand so red.

His fingers are dialing Sledge’s number before he can even stop himself, the beep of the buttons being swallowed by the rush of the cars outside his window. Sledge answers with a breathless, “Hello?”

There’s a sound of a girl in the background, a girl who laughs and calls Sledge by his first name, and Snafu can hear Sledge’s smile stretch across the telephone wire, even from here, and he closes his eyes and pretends that he’s not crying.

“Merriell?” Sledge says, and it’s quiet, and the girl’s voice is farther away now, like Sledge has moved from one room to another to listen closer to the hitched pulls of breath Snafu is taking, the ache of his chest spreading faster and faster. “Merriell, please.”

Snafu hangs up before Sledge says anything else. Sledge calls him twelve times between the drive from the highway to home, and leaves four voicemails with worried, naked questions, and Snafu deletes them all without ever calling back.

***

Sledge keeps calling. Snafu sends him a text message asking who the girl is, the one from the art class, the one who looks like she knows Sledge more than Snafu knows him, more than Sledge has ever let Snafu get to know him.

Sledge texts back that she’s just a friend, and that if he were really jealous, he would have come to Alabama and kicked Sledge’s ass by now.

Snafu smiles, even as he hears the creak of his father’s boots coming closer and closer.

***

The day before he drives down to Mobile, Snafu tells his father about Sledge. He’s already drunk at this point, sitting in his chair in front of the TV with a beer popped open in front of him, his belt buckle shining in the glare, and Snafu knows it’s wrong, knows it’s not what either of them want, but he’s long ago learned that Sledge has changed every single part of him, from the inside out, and not all of it was for the better.

“Dad,” Snafu says, and his father grunts something unintelligible between puffs on his cigarette. “I’ve met someone.”

His father turns to look at him with that hope that shines in his eyes sometimes, the hope that curled itself around the belt tight and never thought to let go. “Yeah?” He says, his drawl slow and cruel.

“Yeah,” Snafu says, his hands in his pockets, his feet together. He’s been planning this since he first knew Sledge’s name, since that first time Sledge looked at him like maybe he wasn’t the only one who felt the way he did. He’s been planning this since that first time they touched each other, the sweat and the dirt and the way Sledge had kissed the blood from his mouth and the way Snafu had held him tighter than he’s held anyone before, their hands pushing against each other even when their bodies had collapsed from exhaustion. “His name is Eugene.”

Snafu’s father looks at him for a long, long moment, caught in between something missing and something that’s been put together after all these reckless years, after all the times Snafu had come home from school and wished for his mother to be standing in the doorway with her apron tied on, planting a kiss on his forehead and apologizing for leaving him here to fend for himself against a man he could never hate, no matter what he tried to prove. He swears under his breath and stands up from the chair, and Snafu doesn’t even move back, because for all the times he’s been through this, he knows delaying it will only make it worse. His father throws a punch and Snafu doesn’t even duck.

“I thought the Marines would have beat it out of you by now, boy,” he says. “Maybe I need to pick up where they left off.”

Snafu says, “Ain’t no need, dad.” He smiles wide, and his teeth are more blood than white, his lip already starting to swell. “I won’t be around much longer.”

“Like hell,” his father says, and swings again.

***

(Snafu takes the car, although he doesn’t mean to.

His father doesn’t even ask him to return it.)

 **III: Autumn**

They go AWOL in California, slipping past the guards at Pendleton with ease. Snafu steals cigarettes from Sledge’s bag and chain smokes in the rental car, and Sledge drives and drives with nowhere in particular in mind, and they stop by a little diner just south of Oceanside, where the locals smile kindly at their accents and the waitress keeps refilling their coffees with shy glances at their uniforms, her wedding ring dull and worn on her finger. Snafu follows Sledge to the bathroom and they fuck in one of the stalls, with Sledge’s face pressed flat against the door, mouthing the graffiti with measured obscenities, Snafu’s hands gripping his hips until they bruise.

It’s their first time without a barrage of Marines danger close and gravely alert, without Snafu’s hand cupping Sledge’s mouth to stop any noise he wouldn’t be able to stop himself, without the sand in their shoes, and the hot, slow burn of the sun, and the sweat that pools and sticks to their skin and keeps them together longer than they need to be. It’s their first time on the cold, hard ground of America, and Snafu turns Sledge around when they finish, and kisses him long and hard, his fingers in Sledge’s hair, and Sledge’s scrabbling, biting mouth pulling him closer and closer, the need for the warmth of his touch greater than any other need.

They leave, elated and tired, and pay for their tab, Snafu flirting harmlessly with the waitress by touching her hand slow and soft, in ways he would never touch Sledge, and she smiles and laughs and brings her other hand up to brush away her hair, making sure he can see her wedding ring, before writing her phone number down on the back of their receipt. Snafu shows Sledge proudly in the car, and Sledge laughs and lights one of Snafu’s cigarettes for him, and Snafu folds up the receipt and drops it out the window somewhere on the 405, watches it flutter once, twice, before it’s gone.

***

“Sledgehammer,” Snafu calls in his creeping drawl, and Sledge pokes his head out of the motel bathroom, his face wet from the shower. Snafu is sitting propped up against the headboard of the bed, and he’s got his hands poised to type on Sledge’s laptop, his face lit by the harsh glow of the screen.

“Yeah?” Sledge says, and he comes out with only a towel around his waist, and Snafu looks up, and he swallows visibly, and Sledge rolls his eyes with a smile, coming to sit at the edge of the bed, right against Snafu’s feet.

“Sidney sent you another email.”

“Oh, yeah?” Sledge says, and he smiles wide and bright and reaches for the laptop, and Snafu’s mouth is a straight line, a pink smear across his face, and he doesn’t know what this feeling is that fills him up in that moment, this feeling like something sharp inside him that claws and tears and likes to watch him bleed.

Snafu watches Sledge’s eyes read over the words, moving from side to side, and he smiles that smile that Sid always brings out of him, that smile that he never gives Snafu, and Snafu knows what’s it like to wish you were someone else, even if you get the better part of the deal as you are, because he might be able to touch and kiss and love through his hands, but Sidney Phillips will always own Sledge’s heart, no matter how far away he is.

***

They drive through California and into Arizona and they stop at the Grand Canyon and walk around the massive walls of rock and Snafu yells until he can’t anymore, his voice echoing and fading and echoing again. Sledge buys him a dream catcher on one of the Indian reservations they pass through, and Snafu hangs it up in every motel they stay in, watches at night as it spins in the push of recycled air through the room, Sledge’s head pillowed on his chest and Snafu’s mouth lost somewhere in Sledge’s hair.

They drive through Utah and then over to Colorado, where they get caught in one of the first snowfalls, and Snafu laughs and runs out in only his dress pants, catching snowflakes with his tongue, his bare feet crunching in the snow, until Sledge yells at him to come back inside, where he makes coffee and heats up leftover pizza in the soiled, old microwave, and brushes the snow from Snafu’s cheeks, leaning down to kiss the moisture away, his lips warm against Snafu’s cold skin. He calls him a crazy Cajun son of a bitch, and Snafu returns in kind, pushing Sledge down on the bed and kissing him relentlessly, his fingers coming back to their own warmth as he peels clothing away, as they push against each other and fight for control, Sledge stopping where Snafu starts, Snafu stopping where Sledge starts, rolling and spinning and turning and cycling back to each other, their mouths bruised and bleeding and their bodies aching and raw.

They spend the rest of the day in bed, and the day after that, and the day after that, until they get the orders to come back to California, to come back and rejoin the polite military society on base, full of children and wives and grunts, the boys who will go to war in a few months and never come back the same, if they come back at all. Snafu knows what this means as they drive in silence back to Pendleton, sitting tucked up in their dress blues and watching kids wave at them from the tinted windows of minivans, Snafu knows that this will be the last time that he sees Sledge, that this will be the last time that they get to touch and live and feel.

Snafu knows that this means they’ll be going home.

***

(“Come with me,” Sledge says with his lips pressed to the flush of Snafu’s heart, kissing and kissing and kissing, his hands around Snafu’s back, his fingers gripping tighter and tighter until Snafu’s blood drains like a sieve, leaving him with streaks that are raw and pale and utterly gutted.

“Come with me,” Sledge says again, and Snafu doesn’t know when Sledge starts to cry, his tears falling in rivulets on Snafu’s chest, his tears like water, like rain, washing away the dirt and sweat of Pendleton, their dress blues in crumpled, sticky piles on the floor, their mouths dry and harsh.

Sledge has a home in Alabama that needs coming back to, a home with a mother and a father who sends him emails everyday with updates of the neighborhood, with updates of the rest of the family scattered around the South, praises and commendations of his father’s medicine practice, stories of his mother’s knitting circle. Sledge has a life, has a home, and Snafu has a father who didn’t know when he left for war, who won’t know when he comes back, tan and muscled and scarred with nightmares of a desert that he will never forget.

“Come with me,” Sledge whispers into Snafu’s skin, soft and sad and miserably hopeful. He looks like a boy then, a boy who’s never been rejected in his life, a boy who always wishes for the happy ending, a boy who’s never been to war.

And Snafu says, “No.”)

***

His father doesn’t say anything from where he sits on his chair when Snafu slips into the house late at night, his bag over his shoulder, his uniform creased with movement. He doesn’t even look up, his fingers steady on a can of beer, his mouth lit and smoking with the cigarette he has between his lips, and Snafu stands there for a moment with his heart beating slow somewhere inside him, and he waits for something, waits for acknowledgement or approval or nothing like what he gets, but his father pulls another drag and turns the channel on the old black and white TV.

“Don’t forget to close the door,” his father says, over the tinny sound of gunfire and explosions, and Snafu forgets why he chose this instead.

***

It’s a week before Sledge texts him. He starts off with “Hi. :)” and ends with “Why did u say no?” and everything in between is Snafu pretending he doesn’t care anymore, pretending he doesn’t still have this thing inside him that burns hot and sharp whenever Sledge touches him, talks to him, kisses him with his mouth on the edge of Snafu’s mouth, pretending that he doesn’t want this as badly as Sledge wants this. Everything in between is Snafu running circles around the words I Love You, and if Sledge knows this, if Sledge knows Snafu better than Snafu knows himself, he doesn’t say.

Snafu texts back, “U shouldn’t have to live ur life like this.”

Snafu texts back, “U should get married, have kids.”

Snafu texts back, “U shouldn’t b with me.”

And Sledge says, “Why r u saying this to me?”

And Snafu replies, “Becuz its true.”

***

No one comes to visit Snafu in New Orleans, mostly because Snafu hasn’t told anyone he’s been back for a little over a month, and mostly because nobody would care to clap him on the shoulder and thank him for defending their country against a place they’ve never seen except on TV. He drinks in dive bars and starts fights with tourists and earns a name for himself running up tabs that he never pays and he swims and he fishes and he smokes all day while his father goes to work at one of the old mills down the road, one of the old mills that stood tall against Katrina, and comes home and hits Snafu for breathing the same air. Snafu collects bruises like he collects calls from Sledge, and it’s the desert all over again, fighting and cursing and spitting to stay alive, but instead of the dry heat of Afghanistan, of Iraq, it’s the wet humidity of Louisiana that sticks to him like a second skin.

He drinks and he fucks and he comes home to sweat in the dark of his room, where Sledge leaves him messages on his phone that reminds him of what he’s missing, what he gave up on, and Snafu thinks that if this is what Sledge was trying to save him from, he didn’t do a good enough job, because this is exactly what Snafu deserves, after months of trying to die in a place with a name he couldn’t even pronounce.

This is exactly how it should be.

***

“You’re losing the war with yourself,” Sledge says on the phone one night when Snafu breaks down and calls him, and it’s this big old mask of military metaphors and analogies that Snafu has been sick of since he stepped foot in Pendleton for the first time, since the big clusterfuck of the desert, since his father drove him down to the recruiters office in the city and watched him sign his name on the dotted line, and goddamn if he will take this from Sledge, too.

“Ain’t nothing you need to concern yourself with, boo,” Snafu says, and his voice is tight and tense and immensely dangerous, the way a snake curls up at the first sign of a threat, and Sledge either hears it and ignores it, or has never known Snafu that well at all.

“Merriell,” Sledge says, and Snafu sucks in a breath at his given name, but Sledge continues on. “You need to stop doing this to yourself. You need to stop.”

Snafu clucks his tongue and lights the last cigarette from his pack, throwing the crumpled up carton into the swamp from where he sits on the railing of his father’s back porch, his legs swinging with abandon. He says nothing, breathes little, and the smell of the smoke lifts up into the air and Snafu watches something slide under the water and disappear.

“I can help you through this,” Sledge says, and Snafu can’t help but laugh, the tickle of his ribs as they pull tight against the place his father had touched the night before. “I can be here for you, I can give you anything you need.”

And that’s what Snafu’s afraid of, even if he doesn’t say it, even if Sledge knows and doesn’t care, asking Snafu to give up the world he knows for the world Sledge is offering, the world Snafu has never seen. Sledge doesn’t know what it’s like to live in this place and be who he is, and he sure as fuck doesn’t know what’s it’s like to wake up in the morning after a night of fire and be disappointed that you lived through it, mortar and IEDs and the quick stops and starts of a language he’s never gotten the hang of, the shadow of men whose skin runs darker with blood, the children crying in the streets. Sledge lived through an entirely different war than Snafu did, because he wanted to come back home in the same piece that he left in, the same shell of a boy who is kind and who wants to love.

Snafu says, “Leave it, Eugene,” and he’s coiling in on himself, he’s growing tighter.

Sledge doesn’t, though, won’t, and pushes on. “Come to Mobile, Merriell,” he says, and swallows back something that sounds wet in his throat. “Come here and I can help you, I can get you through, because if you stay here,” he stops, his voice sounding slow and far away. “If you stay, Merriell, goddammit I don’t think I can sit here a hundred miles away and watch you kill yourself.”

Snafu says, “You’ll leave me?” And his voice is steadier than he thought, straighter, tighter, and he grips the phone to his ear just as he hears his father come in the front door, kicking his shoes off into the kitchen, turning on lights and opening the refrigerator to pull out a can, the quick hiss of the pop top loud in the early evening. He hears his father sit in his chair and turn on the TV, and the cigarette that Snafu is holding between his fingers burns down to the filter, but Snafu doesn’t make a sound when he feels the heat on his skin, doesn’t make a sound when he flicks the dead butt into the swamp.

Sledge inhales, and there’s a hitch there that Snafu feels some pleasure in causing, a hitch there that means that Sledge feels this just as much as Snafu does, maybe more than Snafu does, the wet burn of his eyes and the well of something sharp in his chest. Sledge says, “Yes.”

And Snafu smiles sadly and says, “Good.”

He hangs up before Sledge says anything else, and if his father hears the quiet sobs out on the porch, Snafu’s hand on his face, his arm wrapped around the railing, his body shaking with the hurt and guilt and dread inside, then he doesn’t say anything about it, and Snafu is glad when he hears the volume of the TV raise until it’s almost deafening.

***

(Snafu turns off his phone for a week, not wanting to know what Sledge needs to say to him, not wanting to know why he wants him to leave everything he’s ever known for something he can never have, even if they both want it so much more than they tell each other. He gets drunk and doesn’t leave his room and when his father finds him passed out in a pile of his own vomit, he shakes him awake and tells him that if he wants to die, he can go find somewhere else to do it, because he ain’t no goddamn hospital, and he don’t want the sheriff coming around here like he owns the place.

When Snafu turns his phone back on, he doesn’t have any missed calls.)

 **IV: Summer**

They meet in the dirt and the dust of Iraq.

Sledge holds out his hand and smiles wide underneath the boiling sun, and Snafu raises an eyebrow and spits dip out of the side of his mouth right beside Sledge’s dirty boot. “Don’t tell me your name, boo,” he says, wiping his arm across his forehead, his wrist coming back sticky with sweat. Sledge watches him with a careful eye, pulling back his hand with uncertainty.

Snafu says, “I don’t need to know it.” His voice crackling and spitting and mean, his eyes flush over Sledge’s new uniform, the creases barely a day old.

Snafu says, “We won’t know each other that long.”

And Sledge shrugs, falling into step with him as they move towards the Humvee. 


End file.
